Joru Review

Few things that you've done are so bad that you should kill yourself - even watching Kites. Unfortunately, there is a certain section of youngsters who, on being rejected in love, want to give up their lives, and Joru is a movie with a message for them.

The movie opens in Vizag, with the son of a fisherman (L B Sriram) jumping off a cliff thanks to having failed in love. L B Sriram then adopts Kittu, an orphan, and tries to bring him up well. Sadly, Kittu (Aravind Kumar) turns out to be an illiterate (though he's being sent to college) boor, drunkard, glutton and loafer.

One day Kittu is fooling around, when the latest entrant to his college, the well-to-do and pretty Suma (Aakarsha), randomly comes up to him and tells him that she loves him. There's an explanation for this - she was in the the midst of being ragged. Sadly, neither does Kittu know the real thing nor does his IQ cooperate with this scene, so he promptly falls in love with her and thinks she loves him too.

Suma befriends him and takes him out shopping and all. Soon Kittu proposes to her, and she insults him. Apparently she befriended him out of pity. Unable to bear the rejection, Kittu walks towards the ocean to kill himself. A drunken stranger (Saikumar) stops him on the cliff and when he tells him that he's trying to die, he pushes Kittu by himself.

In the second half, Suma moves to Mumbai after bearing taunts from her entire college about how she killed a person. There she runs into a clean-shaven and rich look-alike of Kittu, called Anand (Aravind Kumar again). She falls in love with him, and eventually gets spurned by him. It is now her turn to run down the by-now-familiar cliff in Vizag. The drunken stranger appears again and pushes her down. Who is this man? Why did he push Kittu? Why did he push Suma? Does he offer bulk deals?

Joru is undoubtedly a well-intentioned movie, with a noble message written all over. Sadly, it is filled up with so many irrelevant and amateurishly constructed scenes you're wondering why they didn't simply crunch the movie into a 60-second documentary and stick its summary on that cliff in Vizag.

The ineffective comedy and the uninteresting family dialogue are ineffective and uninteresting, and one way to deal with them is to conduct a conversation on your mobile phone, in full volume. It doesn't even have to be a fake conversation - no one else is going to be around in the hall anyway.

Except for that of L B Sriram, none of the performances is interesting. Aravind Kumar, a debutant, seems gung ho about his acting career; he's pretty good. The rest of the cast is unremarkable. Thankfully, the visual quality of the flick is good. The songs were composed by Chakri, say the credits, but you can rest assured no one's going to buy the soundtrack of this one.

In all, skip this movie unless it's part of a bet.